I went to see Bob Dylan on Monday. I was at the show just as Hurricane Sandy was emptying its contents onto the East Coast. Dylan played most of his theme-appropriate songs, including "High Water Rising (For Charley Patton)," "Shelter from the Storm," and "The Levee's Gonna Break." Sadly, he did not play "the Hurricane," which is one of my favorite Dylan songs.
This was the third time I had seen Dylan. He was nowhere near as good as the opening act, Mark Knopfler, who seemed as magisterial as ever on guitar and vocals.
Vocally, well, I'm not going to say much about Dylan that hasn't already been said. Kinda sounds like Benicio del Toro in "the Usual Suspects," if he had spent the night with his throat connected to an air-conditioning vent on full blast.
A few folks commented that he just seemed lazy, and that he just "didn't give a fuck" anymore. I don't think that's true, however. He seems strangely averse to enunciation, for sure, but his performance did not show lack of interest. Most notably, he performed a new (or at least new to me) arrangement of every song he in his set list. It would have been much easier for Dylan to play the version everyone knows and the one he's played countless times before. But he took the time to draw up new arrangements and rehearse them with his band. That's a lot harder than alternative, even if it's less crowd pleasing.
The arrangements were uniformly engaging, from my perspective, although not particularly melodic. Perhaps melody is simply something he doesn't aspire to any longer. Though I suppose melody might just be hard to come by with his limited focal range these days.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
Is doping ubiquitous at the highest levels of sport?
I can't answer that question definitively, but my personal belief is that yes, it is.
Few of us were surprised when Lance Armstrong finally received his comeuppance. But I was little confused when the UCI decided to vacate all seven of Lance's victories, rather than give them to the runners-up. Why didn't they give the titles to runners up? Because every one of the runners up for Lance's seven tour titles has been linked to doping as well. So, it's not obvious who, if anyone, was clean during that era. I guess that means that no one deserves the titles. According to the Tour de France, those races simply never happened.
As easy as it is to believe that cheating was common, are we to assume that nobody was clean during that era? I mean, if the 56th-placed rider could somehow prove he was clean and everyone else wasn't, wouldn't he deserve the win?
There's growing evidence of EPO's influence in distance running as well.
These are low-to-mid-tier sports, in terms of both revenue and television audiences. The incentive to take performance enhancing drugs is far greater in football, basketball, and soccer. But yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of discussion about PEDs in these sports. Why not? A mid-tier cyclist might not clear six figures in the Tour de France, whereas the minimum salary for each of the major professional sports leagues in the United States is close to a half a million dollars.
To give one example, in the past three years, only two players have received PED-related suspensions in the NBA. Both players, Rashard Lewis and OJ Mayo, are slender wings, not known for their size or strength.
A typical player in the D League without an NBA contract makes less than a school teacher. And the difference between an end-of-the-bench NBA player and someone in the D league is marginal. None of those players on the wrong side of that dividing line has sought an edge? When we know that weekend warrior distant runners are doing it to collect a few hundred bucks at local road races? Not likely.
The only rational conclusion is that the NBA's testing procedures are either willfully blind or totally ineffective. Either way, I'm sure the truth will come out, eventually. Just as it did with baseball. And just as it did with Lance. Whenever something is everywhere, there's a lot of witnesses. It's only a matter of time when some of them start to speak up.
http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2012/10/25/colberts-million-dollar-offer-to-trump/
http://kottke.org/12/10/the-worst-passwords-of-2012
Few of us were surprised when Lance Armstrong finally received his comeuppance. But I was little confused when the UCI decided to vacate all seven of Lance's victories, rather than give them to the runners-up. Why didn't they give the titles to runners up? Because every one of the runners up for Lance's seven tour titles has been linked to doping as well. So, it's not obvious who, if anyone, was clean during that era. I guess that means that no one deserves the titles. According to the Tour de France, those races simply never happened.
As easy as it is to believe that cheating was common, are we to assume that nobody was clean during that era? I mean, if the 56th-placed rider could somehow prove he was clean and everyone else wasn't, wouldn't he deserve the win?
There's growing evidence of EPO's influence in distance running as well.
These are low-to-mid-tier sports, in terms of both revenue and television audiences. The incentive to take performance enhancing drugs is far greater in football, basketball, and soccer. But yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of discussion about PEDs in these sports. Why not? A mid-tier cyclist might not clear six figures in the Tour de France, whereas the minimum salary for each of the major professional sports leagues in the United States is close to a half a million dollars.
To give one example, in the past three years, only two players have received PED-related suspensions in the NBA. Both players, Rashard Lewis and OJ Mayo, are slender wings, not known for their size or strength.
A typical player in the D League without an NBA contract makes less than a school teacher. And the difference between an end-of-the-bench NBA player and someone in the D league is marginal. None of those players on the wrong side of that dividing line has sought an edge? When we know that weekend warrior distant runners are doing it to collect a few hundred bucks at local road races? Not likely.
The only rational conclusion is that the NBA's testing procedures are either willfully blind or totally ineffective. Either way, I'm sure the truth will come out, eventually. Just as it did with baseball. And just as it did with Lance. Whenever something is everywhere, there's a lot of witnesses. It's only a matter of time when some of them start to speak up.
http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2012/10/25/colberts-million-dollar-offer-to-trump/
http://kottke.org/12/10/the-worst-passwords-of-2012
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